Mailchimp vs Aweber

I recently made a switch from Aweber to Mailchimp.

Both of these are email marketing services. Why did I make a switch? MONEY. Mailchimp is FREE for the first 500 people on your list. If you are a small site that doesn’t generate a lot of revenue then it’s insane to be spending $19.00/month when you have such a small number of subscribers.

Case example would be Virginia Fifth Watchdog. It’s a local political site that has around 60 subscribers. We generate around $20 to $30 a month in Google adsense revenue and had 3114 visitors, 8810 visits, and 24,632 Pageviews for the month of May. We’ve been growing the site over that past 6 months and are getting more and more traffic every day. The problem is the number of people that we have subscribed to the site doesn’t justify spending money (yet) on our newsletter. I kept hearing about Mailchimp, I tried it for another site I run (www.lynchburgteaparty.com) and was impressed by how easy it is to use.
The import of my list from A weber was easy.

I’ll not get into all the features as there are lots of review sites that do this. I will however compare the 2 services most important feature.

The most important thing for me in an email service is the ability to have emails sent based on my RSS feed. WHY? Because I’m a huge fan of automation. With Both Aweber and MailChimp this is an option. It is powerful because you can set your service to send an email of your latest blog post AUTOMATICALLY! Aweber lets you designate how many posts per email. MailChimp does not. Mailchimp takes every post you’ve had in the last 24 hours and sends them at whatever time you set it to. I wish there was a way to tell it to hold off on Mondays and Fridays as all that content is wasted, but hey we can’t have our cake and eat it too…for now that is. You can also tell it to send daily, weekly, monthly.

If your looking for a great service that lets you send lots of emails for FREE then Mailchimp is for you. Their customer service is fantastic. Even I had a question of a technical nature and they were quick to get me taken care of.

If you’ve got a question for me leave a comment and I’ll try to respond.