Mailchimp began in 2001 as a simple e-greeting card tool by founders Ben Chestnut, Mark Armstrong, and later Dan Kurzius. Over time, it evolved into one of the world’s most popular email marketing platforms, launching a freemium model in 2009 and expanding well beyond email into websites, CRM, and powerful automation tools.
In November 2021, it became part of Intuit and was officially rebranded as Intuit Mailchimp, helping integrate email marketing deeply with financial records and small-business tools.
What Mailchimp Does Today
Mailchimp is free software (that incurs costs once your subscriber list grows and you require access to more features) that allows you to communicate with your contacts. Let’s define a few terms, before we go any further:
- Subscriber: this is someone who’s said “yes” to wanting to receive emails from you. This is typically done when they sign up for your list from a form on your website or if they purchase a product from your digital store.
- Audience: this is where subscriber email addresses are stored, think of it like a group of people who’ve opted into getting emails from you.
- Email campaigns & automation: built-in tools for newsletters, drip sequences, and triggered messages.
- Websites & landing pages: drag‑and‑drop builder with SEO, SSL, analytics, and custom domains.
- CRM & audience management: contact tagging, segmentation, dynamic content, and audience journeys.
- SMS & social campaigns: optional add-ons to reach your audience beyond email.
- AI-powered smart features: such as subject‑line writing help, predictive segmentation, and send‑time optimization.
Mailchimp works by allowing you to send an unlimited number of newsletters to an unlimited number of subscribers, which is useful because email providers like Gmail, Outlook, and Yahoo! typically limit the number of people you can send emails to at any given time. Where Mailchimp is helpful is that you can send to hundreds or even millions of people at the same time; the only limit is how many subscribers you currently have in your audience.
How do you send emails with Mailchimp?
You create what’s known as a campaign or automation, you start a new email, you give it a design, you enter in what content you want it to have and you send it out.
Campaigns in Mailchimp can be sent out using different features, including:
- Schedule Send: allows you to schedule an email campaign to send at a future date and time.
- Send Now: immediate delivery after campaign creation.
- Timewarp: sends your email at the same local time in each recipient’s time zone.
- Limitations:
- Only works with Regular campaigns, not automations.
- Requires that contacts have a known time zone, often inferred from IP/geolocation or manually set.
- Limitations:
- Send Time Optimization (STO): uses Mailchimp’s data and AI to predict the best time to send your campaign for each contact based on past engagement (open/click behavior).
- Batch Delivery: sends emails in small batches to large lists over time, reducing server spikes and improving deliverability.
- Automations: send out campaigns automatically based on certain triggers—like someone signs up for your list (and triggers a welcome email), or buys a digital product from your store (and triggers a receipt), or fills in a survey (and triggers a free bonus for filling it in).
Mailchimp also lets you do a lot of other cool things, like create ads on Google, Facebook, and Instagram, create pop-up forms, make your own customized landing pages, or create RSS-to-email automatic campaigns (which send every time you publish something new on your website). The best part about Mailchimp is what’s known as segmentation, which is a fancy way of saying that you can send a specific email to specific people at a specific time. Where this comes in handy is when you want to do things like:
- Send a newsletter only to people who have not purchased your product already.
- Send a newsletter to people who wanted a specific content upgrade you’ve offered.
- Send a newsletter to people who wanted to be notified when you published a new blog post.
The amount of segmentation you can accomplish with Mailchimp is nearly infinite (it’s pretty powerful software), and I will show you exactly what to do, why you should do it, and how to implement it in my Mailchimp video course, Chimp Essentials.
How much does Mailchimp cost?
Mailchimp’s pricing is designed to grow with your business. The Free plan lets you start sending campaigns, building landing pages, and managing up to 500 contacts—without paying a cent. As your audience and needs grow, you can upgrade to a paid plan to unlock key features like automations, advanced segmentation, and email scheduling optimization. Pricing is based on your contact count and the features you need.
- Pay‑As‑You‑Go credits are also available if you prefer non‑recurring email usage.
- SMS/MMS features are offered à la carte via add-ons (US/Canada-focused).
Why use Mailchimp?
Mailchimp is no longer just an email tool, it’s a marketing platform built for individuals and organizations of all sizes. With AI-powered features, SMS and social integrations, and built-in e-commerce and website tools, it helps small businesses manage multi-channel campaigns from one place.
As Mailchimp continues to evolve, even experienced users can benefit from refining their strategies. That’s where Chimp Essentials comes in. We provide hands-on training and strategic guidance tailored specifically to Mailchimp users, helping you make the most of features like segmentation, personalization, and automation.
Simply put, email marketing is the best return on investment you’ll see on the internet. Period. The end.
Using Mailchimp for your email marketing will be more effective than social media (exponentially more cost-effective), yellow page listings, or even paid advertising. According to a study by DMA, sending newsletters has an average return of 38x, meaning for every $1 you send paying for Mailchimp, you’ll typically make $38 back. Since Mailchimp is what I personally use for email marketing, and because I use all the advanced features Mailchimp has to offer, I typically see $120 return for every $1 I spend on my Mailchimp account.
PSST: You can read a full review of Mailchimp vs Mailchimp alternatives right here. A student of the course, Davida Pitts, helped her client raise $38,000 through Mailchimp on a crowdfunding campaign.
How does Mailchimp compare to others?
Mailchimp specifically (over Aweber, Drip or ConvertKit) is the best for email marketing because it’s easy to use, has amazing advanced features, and has really great pricing once you have to pay for it.
For example, what makes me the most revenue are sales funnels (if you sign up for the notification list at the bottom of this post you can see one) that is an automation which triggers to send when someone signs up for the Chimp Essentials list. It sends a survey to each new subscriber, which then customizes the content that gets generated in Mailchimp further along in the automation/drip sequence. It also stops sending the sales emails if someone buys the course, because there’s no need to pitch something if a person has just bought it.
How does Mailchimp specifically compare to other email marketing services? Here are detailed summaries:
Mailchimp’s best feature is that it’s fast and easy to do things like: creating a design for your emails, creating a simple automation sequence, creating a landing page and integrating with ecommerce stores.
Mailchimp’s worst features (see I don’t only drink their kool-aid) are two things. The first is that, if you have several mailing lists in your Mailchimp account, you could end up paying for duplicate subscribers—but I’ll show you how to easily avoid that in Chimp Essentials. Second is that pricing can get expensive as you grow. While Mailchimp’s free plan is generous, costs can rise quickly as your subscriber list grows or if you want access to advanced features. The contact-based pricing model means businesses with large audiences or complex needs might find it costly compared to some competitors.
Conclusion: Mailchimp is great
If you run a business, you need to be using email marketing—it’s that simple. Mailchimp is one of the best platforms available, offering powerful tools to help you grow. While the free plan is a great way to get started, keep in mind that pricing can increase as your list grows, and advanced automation features are only available on higher-tier plans.
That said, Mailchimp’s versatility and multi-channel capabilities make it worth exploring. So why not sign up for a free Mailchimp account today and start building your audience?
If you need help getting started, let’s talk.
