I use mailchimp... not because I want to but because my CRM (ReyRey) is a FAIL.
MailChimp does what a real CRM should do... but can't.
Example: I sent out a large campaign and time warner's system automatically shut me down because they thought I was flooding them with SPAM. It's called email throttling. ReyRey doesn't have it.
MailChip does what a real CRM should do... but can't.
If you send out emails and the email account is dead, MailChimp automatically updates the list and removes the name from the file. Thats just plain Smart. ReyRey doesn't have it (just ignore the 5,320 bounced emails in your inbox!)
That said, mailchimp has many problems.
Maintaining the email list from CRM into MailChimp is a giant time suck.
A real problem for car dealers is our email recipient rejection rate is far higher than other industries AND mailchimp has very high standards and demands very low rejection rates MailChimps very high standards and our above average rejection rates causes MailChimp to suspend our account until we have a "cause and repair" phone meeting with a MailChimp rep. (note: this high email rejection rate is yet another hallmark of car dealer FB fan pages being a LOW ROI time suck).
In the end, MailChimp is a FAIL for me. We've just hired Moore and Scarry for our ad agency and I hand it off to them and it gets done.
Interesting Joe - for I've been highly considering tomoving over MailChimp or AWeber for our email marketing. I currently use eLead CRM for most of our prospect email marketing (they use
StrongMail to manage their email campaigns) and I some of the same issues...
Bad emails are not scrubbed from the CRM so each month I pull a new lest, we're resending to these bad emails. Managing and deleting the bounces in the CRM is always a time suck. I need to call eLead to see if they can scrub this list from their end. I'll cross my fingers.
Exporting the list from eLead only takes a few seconds BUT once the customer buys and IF we would want to drop them from the list - that would take some time. Although there might be a batch unsubscribe import in MailChimp - something worth checking into.
Something else I like that eLead offers that "the others" do not, is tying the campaign back to a sale. A good CRM will show your vehicles sold within a selected date/time frame of sending your email campaign.
Another PLUS that you get from the others would be Google analytic tracking and possibly better segmentation.
I'm an
email marketing machine. I think each dealer is missing out if they're not email strongly marketing to their prospect database.
Joe, how many times did you send your campaigns through Mailchimp before taking a step in another direction?
I ask this because many times it take some time for your list to settle in and normalize when you do your first email address dump.