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Hey, curious about your experience with Mailchimp. I've noticed that people seem to either love it or hate it. What do you think they do well? Where do they fal

Hey, curious about your experience with Mailchimp. I've noticed that people seem to either love it or hate it. What do you think they do well? Where do they fall short? (if at all)

ams6110 9y ago
MailChimp has a nice website. What I don't like about them is that they are in the business of spam email.
onli 9y ago
Not parent, but I'd like to answer :) I use mailchimp for a newsletter for my own SaaS site. It is a nice service, they really do make it easy to send and design a mail. Their editor is good, their HTML-plaintext conversion works reasonably well. What I do not like is the workflow. It's like my usecase is completely unsupported, and I do not understand which usecase they do support. Every time you send a mail you start from scratch: They make you start a new campaign(?), pick again a template, fill in the from address, write a text by editing the template. The workflow does not at all support the thinking that all I do is send a new issue to the same ML like always, which should of course use the same template and infos as always as starting point, where the main thing to do is to change the text in the mail. I guess they support some marketers definition of how things work there? But really feels strange, as if the text of the mail is an afterthought.
- paulcole 9y ago
  If you’re using your last campaign as your starting point, why aren’t you just replicating it and starting from there? https://kb.mailchimp.com/campaigns/ways-to-build/replicate-a-campaign https://kb.mailchimp.com/campaigns/ways-to-build/replicate-a...
kenning 9y ago
I've been using mailchimp for the first time in the last couple weeks and found it to be a similar experience to squarespace: extremely friendly to non-coders, but kind of buggy and somewhat hard to use beyond their given templates. (Even the design looks very similar) My specific problem: I fiddled with the "merge fields" (basically handlebars regex-replace tool) and somehow this broke my email template, but only after I had tested it once and it worked properly. When I copied the original (working) "campaign" and re-sent it, all the text of the email was gone. I copied it and fixed the merge fields, then all the images were gone. After reimporting the images it finally worked. The really frightening part was that it worked the first time but somehow the act of copying the working email with weird merge fields broke a bunch of other things. So I suppose the copying was imperfect and created a problem with their regex-replace logic the second time. Very glad I tested it a second time before sending it out, overall it took me 6 tries to get it working properly. I'm on the free tier, and customer support is a paid feature, so I had to figure this out myself.
- whitepoplar 9y ago
  Thanks for the reply! That sounds frightening, frankly.
jonathan-kosgei 9y ago
I hate mailchimp and prefer to use tinyletter.com. I can't talk enough about how much I love tinyletter!
- whitepoplar 9y ago
  I'm curious (working on a project in the space), what makes you hate Mailchimp? What do you love most about Tinyletter?
- flaviocopes 9y ago
  TinyLetter is amazing. Simple, easy to use, just does what you need without templates, campaigns and other stuff that gets in the way between you and subscribers receiving an update from you.

Hey, curious about your experience with Mailchimp. I've noticed that people seem to either love it or hate it. What do you think they do well? Where do they fall short? (if at all)

ams6110 9y ago

MailChimp has a nice website. What I don't like about them is that they are in the business of spam email.

onli 9y ago

Not parent, but I'd like to answer :) I use mailchimp for a newsletter for my own SaaS site. It is a nice service, they really do make it easy to send and design a mail. Their editor is good, their HTML-plaintext conversion works reasonably well. What I do not like is the workflow. It's like my usecase is completely unsupported, and I do not understand which usecase they do support. Every time you send a mail you start from scratch: They make you start a new campaign(?), pick again a template, fill in the from address, write a text by editing the template. The workflow does not at all support the thinking that all I do is send a new issue to the same ML like always, which should of course use the same template and infos as always as starting point, where the main thing to do is to change the text in the mail. I guess they support some marketers definition of how things work there? But really feels strange, as if the text of the mail is an afterthought.

paulcole 9y ago
If you’re using your last campaign as your starting point, why aren’t you just replicating it and starting from there? https://kb.mailchimp.com/campaigns/ways-to-build/replicate-a-campaign https://kb.mailchimp.com/campaigns/ways-to-build/replicate-a...

kenning 9y ago

I've been using mailchimp for the first time in the last couple weeks and found it to be a similar experience to squarespace: extremely friendly to non-coders, but kind of buggy and somewhat hard to use beyond their given templates. (Even the design looks very similar) My specific problem: I fiddled with the "merge fields" (basically handlebars regex-replace tool) and somehow this broke my email template, but only after I had tested it once and it worked properly. When I copied the original (working) "campaign" and re-sent it, all the text of the email was gone. I copied it and fixed the merge fields, then all the images were gone. After reimporting the images it finally worked. The really frightening part was that it worked the first time but somehow the act of copying the working email with weird merge fields broke a bunch of other things. So I suppose the copying was imperfect and created a problem with their regex-replace logic the second time. Very glad I tested it a second time before sending it out, overall it took me 6 tries to get it working properly. I'm on the free tier, and customer support is a paid feature, so I had to figure this out myself.

whitepoplar 9y ago
Thanks for the reply! That sounds frightening, frankly.

jonathan-kosgei 9y ago

I hate mailchimp and prefer to use tinyletter.com. I can't talk enough about how much I love tinyletter!

whitepoplar 9y ago
I'm curious (working on a project in the space), what makes you hate Mailchimp? What do you love most about Tinyletter?
flaviocopes 9y ago
TinyLetter is amazing. Simple, easy to use, just does what you need without templates, campaigns and other stuff that gets in the way between you and subscribers receiving an update from you.