Mailchimp Vs. Direct Email: Which is Right for Your Marketing?

In a prospective client meeting recently, I was asked: “why should I email my clients through Mailchimp rather than just mailing them from my regular email account?”

It’s a good question, and one that you may have too. So, here’s what I told him…

Sending emails directly seems straightforward, right? You compose your message, add your recipients, and hit send. But, while this works for small, personal communications, it quickly becomes problematic for marketing campaigns.

The main advantage of Mailchimp is its email marketing features that you just don’t get in your own email system.

Here’s a run down of why so many businesses opt for a dedicated email campaign platform for their regular communications to their database…

• Professional Templates: Easily create visually appealing and mobile-friendly emails with on-brand graphics to ramp up brand recognition and show your contacts that you’ve invested in your professional image. If you’re rebranding or scaling-up your business, this approach really helps to reinforce this impression of size and position in the market.

  
  

• List Management & Segmentation: Easily organize your audience into targeted groups for personalized messaging. Being able to easily segment your audience means you can send specific messages to targeted groups of people. When your message is well-aligned to the recipient, it has a much better chance of being opened, read, and acted upon.

  
  

• Detailed Analytics: With platforms like Mailchimp, you can track open rates, click-through rates, conversions, and other key metrics to measure campaign performance, so you’ll know exactly how it landed and can use this data to refine your strategy for the next campaign.

Can you track who opened your direct emails, what they clicked on whilst reading them, and what actions they took after they’d clicked? Nope!

• Compliance: With built-in tools to manage unsubscribes and ensure you’re being GDPR-compliant, you can avoid ending up on the SPAM list or, even worse, getting into hot water over data consent issues.

  
  

• Scalability: Using a service such as Mailchimp makes it easier to manage communications throughout your company’s growth. As well as being able to sync your new contacts, you can also set-up automated emails (always leaves a good impression when a new client receives a lovely welcome email) and nurture your growing email lists.

While sending emails directly might seem appealing in the short term, it's much more manual, time-consuming, and not sustainable in the long-term if you plan to grow your database.

Fine for simple, one-off messages to individual clients (or even a small handful of clients), but without advanced functionalities it’s less intuitive (and may appear less professional) for wider business communications.

If you need to send targeted, professional email campaigns with advanced features like automation and segmentation, Mailchimp is the better choice.